An intrepid journalist joins the planet's largest group of nomads on an annual migration that, like them, has endured for centuries.
Anna Badkhen has forged a career chronicling life in extremis around the world, from war-torn Afghanistan to the border regions of the American Southwest. In Walking with Abel, she embeds herself with a family of Fulani cowboys - nomadic herders in Mali's Sahel grasslands - as they embark on their annual migration across the savanna. It's a cycle that connects the Fulani to their past even as their present is increasingly under threat - from Islamic militants, climate change, and the ever-encroaching urbanization that lures away their young. The Fulani, though, are no strangers to uncertainty - brilliantly resourceful and resilient, they've contended with famines, droughts, and wars for centuries.
Dubbed 'Anna Ba' by the nomads, who embrace her as one of theirs, Badkhen narrates the Fulani's journeys and her own with compassion and keen observation, transporting us from the Neolithic Sahara crisscrossed by rivers and abundant with wildlife to obelisk forests where the Fulani's Stone Age ancestors painted tributes to cattle. As they cross the Sahel, the savanna belt that stretches from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic, they accompany themselves with Fulani music they download to their cell phones and tales of herders and hustlers, griots and holy men, infused with the myths the Fulani tell themselves to ground their past, make sense of their identity, and safeguard their - our - future.
Praise for Walking with Abel: Named a Top Summer Reading Pick by the Los Angeles Times, Playboy, Esquire, Christian Science Monitor, Vol 1. Brooklyn, BBC.com, and Mental Floss
'Badkhen's rich and lucid prose illustrates her journey as vividly as might a series of photographs . . . By the time readers put the book down, they will have done something remarkable: visited a mostly inhospitable but eminently seductive locale alongside a storyteller able to render the strange and different both familiar and engrossing. Walking With Abel not only takes us somewhere new, it viscerally reminds us that such places still exist in the world.' Christian Science Monitor
'Fascinating . . . highly ambitious and deeply profound.' Los Angeles Times
'Lyrical and meditative . . . a tender tribute to a people deeply rooted in the land.' Boston Globe
' D isplays the skill of a writer accustomed to telling the stories of those living unimaginable lives.' Ms. Magazine
' Badkhen who was given the Fulani name Anna Bâ, describes all in graceful prose, word paintings that approach poetry . . . nearly perfect.' Minneapolis Star-Tribune
'Fascinating.' The Brian Lehrer Show
'Enthralling . . . Walking with Abel is essential reading.' Dayton Daily News
'Staggeringly vivid . . . poetic, and tactile . . . Walking with Abel amasses much of its strength from isolated movements taken together. It's a subtle path, but a deeply effective one.' Biographile
'Extraordinarily poetic.' BBC.com
' The Fulani live in the here and now in ways the modern world has lost even the memory of, and their story, told with deftly measured, evocative prose and poetically precise detail, slows the reader down to consider just what that means . . . Badkhen infuses her story with the kind of authenticity only a fellow traveler can know.' BookPage
'We swooned over Anna Badkhen's writing the way we did for Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers.'
